How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art

 

Andreas Andersen, “Interior with Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence,” 1894, from
“The First Homosexuals:The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago.Credit...

 

Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. Arthur Lubow reports. 

The New York Times, July 12, 2025

When did homosexuality change from a description of what people do to a definition of who they are? How was an act transformed into an identity? In this precarious moment, as White House pronouncements, court decisions and public polling indicate backsliding support for gay rights in this country, such questions, long chewed over by scholars of sociology, philosophy and gender studies, are addressed in two impressive art exhibitions in Chicago.

Six years in the making, “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” at Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago, through Aug. 2, is an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art. With roughly 300 works on view, venturing beyond Europe and North America to include Latin America and Asia, it is a huge show. Yet the curator Jonathan D. Katz, who was assisted by Johnny Willis, said that procuring loans from international museums for an exhibition with this title and focus was a struggle, and more often than not, the requests were refused. Indeed, at the last moment, two promised paintings from Slovakia, which is governed by a socially conservative populist party, were withdrawn; a large black-and-white reproduction of one is hanging on a wall.

Coincidentally, a superlative exhibition nearby, “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of Chicago until Oct. 5, explores how the Impressionist master concentrated on the portrayal of men, at a time when turning the male gaze on another man was almost unthinkable. Most of his depictions are not overtly homoerotic. However, in a large painting, scandalous in its day and startling even now, he viewed from behind a naked man drying himself. It’s the sort of boudoir picture that his friend Edgar Degas frequently made of female bathers. Caillebotte, who died at 45 in 1894, lived with a woman and never identified as gay. An important lesson drawn from both shows is that categories like gay and straight are markers of our time, not his.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Man at His Bath,” 1884, from “Caillebotte: Painting His World”
at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Impressionist master turned the male gaze on another
man, an almost unthinkable perspective at the time.Credit...via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

As documented in the erudite and sumptuous “First Homosexuals” catalog, the term “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) came into being in the 1860s, along with “urning,” a newly coined word that has not lasted so well. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, divided humanity into those who are innately attracted to the opposite sex, and the “urnings” who are enamored of their own. A few years later, the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny came up with “homosexual.” Unlike Ulrichs, he viewed sexual choice as a changeable taste, not a binary division, akin to deciding what dish to cook for dinner. Yet in the years that followed, Ulrichs’s hard-and-fast split between gay and straight came to be popularized with Kertbeny’s terminology.

Katz argues that at about the turn of the 20th century, in light of behavioral and psychological research, same-sex attraction shifted. Instead of something that could turn like a weather vane, it came to be regarded as an immutable orientation, and the objects of erotic fascination for gay and lesbian artists changed, too. Earlier gay artists embraced indeterminacy and represented bodies that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. But once homosexuality was no longer viewed as a momentary preference, androgynous adolescents gave way to muscular men and buxom women.

Gustave Courtois, “Narcissus,” 1872, from “The First Homosexuals,” at Wrightwood 659.
Courtois in his early works elided the distinction between male and female.Credit...
Marseille, musée des Beaux-Arts/Claude Almodovar-Michel Vialle; via Wrightwood 659

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, “La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress),” 1879. Graphite, ink and ink
wash on paper, Wrightwood 659.Credit...via Schiller & Bodo European Paintings and Wrightwood 659

Two paintings in the show by the academic French painter Gustave Courtois illustrate this transformation. In 1872, Courtois limned the nude body of a young model who posed as the self-adoring Narcissus. With his sex discreetly hidden by a ribbon, Narcissus elides the distinction between male and female. But over the next 35 years, Courtois rechanneled his energies. Painting a portrait of Maurice Dériaz, a professional bodybuilder, in 1907, Courtois clearly relished Dériaz’s dark mustache and bulging biceps as emblems of virility.

Courtois is believed to have been the life partner of another painter, Carl Ernst von Stetten. The exhibition includes a polished drawing of them walking arm in arm, which the art historian André Dombrowski asserts in an essay is the first known depiction of a modern gay male couple in European art. Women more frequently paired off as loving friends; the show features many depictions of lesbian domesticity, including the photos that Alice Austen made on Staten Island at the end of the 19th century, of herself and her friends, holding each other tenderly or frolicking in drag.

Alice Austen, “The Darned Club,” 1891, a depiction of lesbian domesticity. Austen
made a tender image on Staten Island of herself and her friends.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

Many of the gay male encounters portrayed in Western art are fleeting or transactional. In early 20th-century America, George Bellows, who was not gay, made a print of a public bathhouse that centers on a naked effeminate youth flirting outrageously with a stout older chap; and Charles Demuth, who was gay, depicted himself in conversation with two sailors on a street outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Same-sex relations between men were thought to be driven by lust, not affection.

But in other cultures, same-sex relations and gender nonconformity were accepted. The exhibition includes fascinating depictions of cross-dressers in the early 19th century on the street in Lima, Peru; the erotic adventures of a young man engaged with male and female lovers in a Japanese scroll from the mid-19th century; and the tender intimacies in the early 20th century of Uzbek men with youths who worked traditionally as singers and dancers.

Francisco Fierro, “Hombres vestidos de mujer,” circa 1834-41, depicts a cross-dresser
on the street in Lima, Peru.Credit...Museo de Arte de Lima, via Wrightwood 659; Photo by Daniel Giannoni

Charles Demuth, “On ‘That’ Street,” 1932. Watercolor over graphite.Credit...via Wrightwood 659

And even in the West, by the end of the 19th century, one can find affectionate scenes of domesticity, such as a painting from 1893 by the Danish artist Emilie Mundt of her female partner, their adopted daughter, and the partner’s elderly father at the piano; and a remarkable portrayal the next year by Andreas Andersen of his sculptor brother Hendrik lying under a duvet and stroking a pink-ribboned kitten, as the artist John Briggs Potter, naked at the foot of the bed, pulls on a sock.

For sheer eccentricity, it would be hard to outdo Elisàr von Kupffer, who called himself Elisarion. With his partner, Eduard von Mayer, also an artist, he lived in a mansion in southern Switzerland that he deemed a temple dedicated to a self-styled religion that denied gender differences. His endearingly campy 1915-16 oil painting of two youths in a chapel being joined in union by another young man, all of them nude, is said to be the first artistic depiction of a same-sex wedding.

Elisàr von Kupffer, “La Nuova lega (The New Union),” 1915-1916, an early depiction
of a same-sex wedding.Credit...Municipality of Minusio — Centro Elisarion, via Wrightwood 659

Unlike these gay fantasies, in the art of Caillebotte there is no certain tip-off to sexual orientation. A wide-ranging talent who energetically pursued boating, boat design, philately and gardening, along with painting, the independently wealthy artist was for many years remembered primarily as a patron of his fellow Impressionists, bequeathing his collection of their work to France. When his own art was rediscovered, it was hailed for its radical use of perspective and cropped framing, which he derived from photography. The more recent curiosity about Caillebotte’s interest in masculine subjects raises questions that can’t be answered, and the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.

But naysayers who argue that finding traces of homoeroticism in Caillebotte’s work is an unsupported anachronism are mistaken. His first major painting, “Floor Scrapers,” depicted bare-chested muscular men stripping the wood parquet in the apartment of his parents. Its rejection by the establishment Salon of 1875 led Caillebotte to ally himself with the Impressionists and exhibit with them the following year. When he took up boating at his country estate outside Paris, his paintings of the sporting activity, unlike those of his colleagues Manet, Monet and Renoir, depicted only lithe men at the oars, rather than fashionable male-female couples. Most of the men he portrayed were not engaged in war, hunting or business, but within domestic settings thought to constitute the feminine domain.

Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875. The Art Institute of Chicago focuses on his subjects,
often lithe men, but the curators are careful to avoid making any claims about his sexuality.Credit...
via of Musée d’Orsay, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Franck Raux

These musings are not merely the product of our own day. The almost life-size “Man at His Bath,” with its subject prosaically naked rather than heroically or classically nude, provoked embarrassment and hostility when Caillebotte tried to exhibit it in 1884. It would have held pride of place at Wrightwood 659; none of the artists in that show, gifted and intriguing as many of them are, approaches Caillebotte in achievement. He painted the towel with white and gray slashes of pigment, but stippled the skin lovingly in flesh tones, with rosy highlights on the buttocks. Eventually, the canvas was accepted for an exhibition by the progressive Brussels artists society, Les XX, in 1888, but the organizers hid it in a back room to avoid attention. The following year, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris, Paul Durand-Ruel, declined to show it, and Caillebotte, who didn’t need to sell his paintings, withdrew from exhibiting for the remainder of his life.

Caillebotte’s reputation hardly rests on his predilection for male subjects. His vertiginous depictions of the street as viewed from his balcony, which are included in the exhibition, are justifiably acclaimed. His most famous painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” a treasure of the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective, bold cropping and a choreography that softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet, doesn’t gain anything from scrutinizing in what direction the male protagonist is looking.

“Paris Street; Rainy Day,” 1877. Caillebotte’s masterwork at the Art Institute, with its exaggerated perspective and bold cropping, softens the bustle of urban life into a gentle ballet.Credit...via The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. Worcester Collection

Indeed, the hunt for telltale signs of his sexual orientation turns ludicrous at times. The notion that the working-class fellow looking out over the Pont de l’Europe, in Caillebotte’s painting of that name, could be a sex worker eyed by the well-dressed bourgeois who is the artist’s double — as suggested in an essay by a feminist art historian, Norma Broude, that is cited in the catalog — strikes me as absurd. Yet refusing to acknowledge the homosocial, and in some instances homoerotic, elements in Caillebotte’s work is also a distortion of the record.

At this politically charged moment, American arts institutions seem anxious to avoid controversy. Wrightwood 659 offered to send its monumental exhibition to a major museum, without a fee and even covering the costs. It received no acceptances (although an abbreviated version, one-fifth the size, will be shown at the Kunstmuseum Basel next year). And the Art Institute chose a banal and anodyne title for its Caillebotte exhibition, “Painting His World,” forgoing the title of the Musée d’Orsay and the J. Paul Getty Museum shows: “Painting Men.” Asked why, the Chicago curator Gloria Groom said the new title was more “inclusive”: the show displays the artist’s sole female nude and a few other nonconforming works. But in practice, the rebranding obscures the originality of this take on Caillebotte’s oeuvre. Maybe the art world has not come so far as we might think from the days when “Man at His Bath” was hidden in a virtual closet.

The very gay life of writer Edmund White

 By Aaron Hicklin

The New York Times, June 7-8, 2025

Edmund white might have invented the unapologetic queer on the page. At least, he did for me. Nothing coded gay, vaguely tragic; nothing furtive or metaphorical or obscure behind the billowing curtains of literary flounciness.

I can still recall the thrill of spotting the cover of his 1983 novel "A Boy's Own Story" in a rotating rack of paperbacks in a bookstore in my dull, conservative hometown, Marlborough, England. I must have been about 15. It was the mid-1980s, the thick of the AIDS plague, and gay men were being cast as vectors of their own destruction.

It was a complicated time to be thinking about coming out. But here was a novel with a boy on the cover who looked close to my age, his thick glossy hair gently ruffled by the wind, his lips plump, his jaw strong. His tank top revealed the slope of his shoulders, the contours of his biceps.

I'd never seen a cover or read a book that spoke to me like that. The fact that a gay teenager could exist in fiction blew my mind. The fact that one, like me, could exist in the world did, too. "A Boy's Own Story" was daring not just because it placed a queer adolescent at its center, but also because it did so with sophistication, introspection and horniness. The narrator --clearly, as with all of his narrators, based on him-- is vividly real.

Ed White and I were later to become friends, when I had  moved to New York and was editing Out magazine. This was not a surprise: Ed, who died on Tuesday [June 3] at 85, was always very open to meeting young literary men. He was a raconteur and had stories for miles. I lapped them up. We all did.

Talking frankly about sex was a hallmark of his writing. (Among his many nonfiction works was "The Joy of Gay Sex," a sex manual he co-wrote [with Dr. Charles Silverstein] in 1997.) He always saw himself as a gay writer for gay readers, the distinction he drew between his generation of queer writes and those who came earlier, like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. They might write gay characters, but they never seemed to be writing for gay readers. Ed was.

The Stonewall riots of 1969, which he took part in, had reshaped him. Before Stonewall, "we had always thought of ourselves as a diagnosis, as a malady," he once told me, echoing the medical establishment's view of homosexuality. "Suddenly, it was all switched, and we were a minority. I saw myself as a freedom fighter. It mobilized my anger. I just think anger towards other people is better than self-hatred."

His most recent book, "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir," published in January, continued that fight to just tell his story, both his own and also, though the details might vary, all queer people's. Ed had no patience for prudes, and he loved to talk about young lovers who were "gerontophiles," a word he clearly relished. He didn't care for respectability. "Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now they are getting married and fathering offsprings," he wrote in a rather salty forward to "The Loves of My Life."

Off the page, he was just as defiant. The British writer and playwright Neil Bartlett recalls attending a lavish soiree in Paris in 1984, hosted by Marie-Claude Brunhoff, a society fixture. Mr. Bartlett was Ed's companion for the night, and was, at Ed's insistence, seated next to the host despite his wearing eyeliner, a chain around his neck, and jeans peppered with so many holes you could see right through them. "I have never been prouder to be someone's piece of rough trade," Mr. Bartlett said.

One virtue of being a pioneer of autofiction: Everything is already out there. Ed never felt the need to censor himself. "From the beginning of his writing career, White enjoyed shocking readers in the spirit of Jean Genet. on whom White wrote a wonderful biography," said the writer and academic Blake Smith. "You can find basically every sexual scenario from incest to cuckoldry to hustling in his novels --and a lot of it in his memoirs as well!"

The last time I saw Ed was on April 7, in what would be the final on-camera interview for a documentary Brian Montopoli and I are making. Ed was eager to plumb his memories, even if the names sometimes took a little longer to surface. Sitting in his small apartment in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, I felt that I had stepped into a vanished New York, one where books spilled from the shelves and the walls crowded with art from friends --including a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Ed with Truman Capote.

Whenever I visited, I'd bring a cake or cookies, and we'd sit at the cluttered dining table, while Ed brought me up to speed on what he'd read, who had visited, and what he was working on. He was always working on something. That never changed. A new novel was underway, he told us; another had just been sent to his agent.

We talked a lot about the legacy of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers that met irregularly in New York in 1980 and 1981 and that included Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grimley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Georgee Whitmore and Ed. Four died during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. Picano died in March. Only Mr. Holleran now remains.

On that last visit, we landed on our documentary's working title: "The Winter of Edmund White," a nod to his age, but not to his spirit, which remained impish, magnetic and razor sharp. When the subject of death arose, he was characteristically unflinching. "The dying part I don't look forward to, but being dead is OK. It's like being asleep," he said. Then, with that sly, knowing smile of his, he added, "I guess I think if I keep writing, I won't die."

On that score, he was right. Through his books, Ed endures. He embraced the role of gay elder, guiding generations who came to him for direction and support. No one was better read or more willing to share what he had read. His apartment was a kind of salon, where he and his partner, the writer Michael Carroll, hosted a rotating cast of artists, writers and thinkers. He was so generous with his time, and endlessly curious.

So many younger writers owe their careers to his encouragement and support (he was prolific at writing blurbs for debut authors' books), and in a sense they could be called his progeny. "He was like my N.Y.C. parent," the writer Christopher Bollen replied when I texted him to commiserate. "I'm so heartbroken. But also so lucky."

A revelation from that last interview was that Ed still met weekly with a boyfriend from his teenage years. For someone who had lost so many friends and lovers, this struck me as profoundly poignant, but it also exemplified Ed's idea of queer or chosen family, long before the term became hackneyed. He had gone through AIDS, and contracted HIV in 1984. He understood that queer family was all he had.

Writing for Ed was a confessional. In more that 30 novels and memoirs he revisited much of the same territory, even when his books were set in the future, like his 2022 novel "A Previous Life," in which he explored a devastating affair with a young Italian aristocrat by imagining his former lover as a ridiculous old man looking back on a forgotten gay novelist called Edmund White. What an audacious move for an octogenarian novelist. He was also a stylist, one who cared about sentences, but he also liked to "roughen up beautiful surfaces," to quote the writer Garth Greenwell, another White protégé.

"If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance, we should recognize we are still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen --and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know," he wrote in "The Loves of My Life."

Most important, he understood that our stories had to be written so they could not be undone, and that books were the last defense against erasure. That his death should come on the same day that Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, is the kind of bitter coincidence that probably would have made him laugh.

Not that he craved straight society's approval. Edmund White had no use for shame, and, in both life and work, he refused to sand down the edges of queer existence to make it palatable. Acceptance was never the point. Truth was.

The Night Train_short film

The Night Train (Nattåget) is a precious Swedish short film directed by Jerry Carlsson, and first released at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, starring actors Khalil Ben Gharbia (Paris, 1999) and Erik Nilsson (Stockholm, 1993). 15 min.

Oskar is on the night train, heading home after an interview in Stockholm. With a long night ahead of him, he makes eye contact with Ahmad. For the first time, he meets the gaze of someone who feels the same desire as he does.

The hidden gay lives finally being uncovered

In the past, the amazing stories of LGBTQ+ people were actively suppressed – which is why fiction writers are now diving into queer history and filling in the gaps, writes Matt Cain. 

15th June 2021 BBC Culture BOOKS

Earlier this year, the TV miniseries It's a Sin rightly won acclaim for its depiction of the Aids crisis in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. But when I heard people raving about the show, written by Russell T Davies, I was struck by how many of them admitted to knowing little about the epidemic – and the destruction it wreaked among the gay community.

That’s because, even in today's much more accepting society, the history of the gay and lesbian community is largely a forgotten history. For a long time, the mainstream public didn't want to hear our stories. "I would venture to say that the public were disgusted and outraged," says author Crystal Jeans. She points to the response to the watershed lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall in the 1920s as just one famous example of the way authors have caused hysteria simply by acknowledging queer lives. Despite the book containing just two very mildly suggestive sexual references, "everyone went berserk and it was banned", she says.

Stephen Hornby, national playwright-in-residence for the UK's LGBT History Month, argues that our stories have long been actively suppressed. "The only interest used to be in censoring or denying any queer elements of the records of the past. So, things were kept from public display, passages were omitted from books and sexual relationships were presented as passionate friendships. That was wilful and deliberate distortion." But now society is becoming much more welcoming of queer people, there's a huge appetite to hear our stories. And there are so many amazing stories to tell. 

The range of queer stories

On the one hand, there are the tales of famous figures like Greta Garbo, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich, Tchaikovsky, Josephine Baker and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom experienced same-sex desire or engaged in same-sex activity in societies that didn't welcome it, often channelling their frustrations into creating remarkable work that went on, in some cases, to determine the course of Western culture. On the other hand are the invisible stories of the millions of everyday men and women whose lives made less of a mark but included events as dramatic as familial rejection, professional dismissal, social exclusion, blackmail, criminal conviction, imprisonment, torture, electric shock therapy, chemical castration, and execution.

Arguably, even the most ordinary queer person of a certain age has lived an extraordinary life. And, when you consider the impact that the challenges they faced must have had on their emotions and relationships, you have the ingredients for gripping, moving, rousing drama – and characters that modern-day audiences are now ready to root for.

This is what inspired me to write my latest novel, The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. It's about a lonely, socially awkward and secretly gay postman living in a fictional town in the north of England who hits retirement, realising he wants to turn his life around and finally be happy – but to do this, he needs to find the love of his life, a man he hasn’t seen for nearly 50 years. His search for his lost love is interspersed with a series of flashbacks to his youth that gradually reveal the pressures their relationship found itself under as a result of the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s – and ultimately how these pressures tore them apart.

I'm not the only writer who's introducing queer history to a popular audience. My novel The Secret Life Of Albert Entwistle is riding on a wave of interest that dates back in the UK to 2017 and the 50th anniversary of the beginning of decriminalisation of homosexuality. That same year, the so-called "Alan Turing law" offered pardons to 49,000 British gay men who’d been convicted of homosexual acts – following a campaign arguably bolstered by the greater awareness brought about by The Imitation Game, the hit film that depicted the conviction and chemical castration of the Enigma-codebreaking computer scientist.

The increased interest in queer history is by no means limited to the UK. Loving by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell is a book of photos from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (found in flea markets and car boot sales) that show men who appear to be in love. It was launched in the US and internationally in October 2020 – and is already entering its fifth print-run. Over on Instagram, The Aids Memorial shares photos and stories of people – predominantly gay men – who died of the disease, written by those who loved them. It now has 185,000 followers. Meanwhile, on Netflix, 2020 documentary A Secret Love tells the story of a US lesbian couple who kept their relationship secret from their families for nearly seven decades.

However, it's fiction that’s very much driving the phenomenon of bringing "lost" stories of gay life from the past to light. Over the last five years, a trio of Irish writers have delivered stunning gay-themed novels set predominantly in periods of history that didn't welcome them – John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), Graham Norton (Home Stretch), and Sebastian Barry (the Costa Award-winning Days Without End). In the theatre, Matthew Lopez's exploration of gay male history The Inheritance triumphed in London before transferring to New York, where it opened the year after a well-received revival of Mart Crowley's seminal 1968 play Boys in the Band. Last year, the latter was remade as a film for Netflix by Ryan Murphy.

Indeed, Murphy has led the way with fictionalising queer history for a popular TV audience: having finished its third and final season last week, Pose blew open the drag ball culture scene of New York in the late 80s, and last year's Hollywood was a LGBTQ+-themed fantasy set in 1940s Los Angeles. Elsewhere on the small screen, It’s a Sin's five episodes have had a total of over 18 million views in the UK, while it earned near-universal raves on both sides of the Atlantic. Add to this recent queer-themed period films Carol and Call Me By Your Name, plus the French indie hit 120 Beats Per Minute, a love story set amongst the Aids activist movement of 1980s Paris, and it is clear that there is now a huge scope for telling queer stories in mainstream film and TV. Most recently, the internet exploded with behind-the-scenes photos of Harry Styles from the shoot of new film My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts's 2012 novel starring the pop superstar as a closeted gay man in the 1950s.

Why fiction is leading the way

As a novelist, it interests me that fiction is at the forefront of this dissemination of queer history. This may be because any historians wanting to write about real-life characters are faced with a very serious problem. Most queer people from the past went to great lengths to conceal their identity – sometimes marrying and starting families, at the very least destroying all evidence. After their deaths, if families found letters, diaries or photos, they usually destroyed them (which explains why those photos featured in the picture book Loving come with no caption or explanation). This has made it all too easy for historians to erase our existence from the record and deny the contribution we’ve made to society.

Even when evidence does exist of same-sex relations – as is the case with 19th-Century Yorkshire landowner Anne Lister, the subject of BBC/HBO series Gentleman Jack, or Queen Anne, subject of Oscar-winning film The Favourite – this is often coded, covert or patchy. We have to rely on fiction to fill in the gaps.

"Filling the gaps in is my speciality," says British writer Patrick Gale, whose 2017 BBC TV drama Man in An Orange Shirt explored the fallout of same-sex desire echoing through three generations of one family. "In fact, I’m only drawn to fictionalising true-life material where there are gaps in what can be known or proved." Gale's 2015 novel A Place Called Winter saw him draw inspiration from the story of his great grandfather Harry, who left his family and emigrated to Canada in the early 20th Century. However, as a way of explaining the mystery surrounding why Harry left behind everything he knew, Gale imagined a situation in which he was forced to leave as a result of a gay affair being exposed. "[His story] had these echoing spaces in it which I could join by using my imagination and wondering how I’d have behaved in his position."

Gale is taking similar imaginative leaps with his next novel, which is about the British poet Charles Causley. "He was quite clearly queer – to judge from his private letters and diaries – and yet not remotely ready to be comfortable with admitting that, even to himself," he explains. "We know he was in the Navy and that he wrote poems which suggest his war experiences carried a powerful emotional charge; we know that he kept until his dying day a letter from a fellow officer with whom he seems to have had some kind of relationship. So what fiction can do, which a straightforward biography cannot, is to solve those mysteries in an emotional nourishing way. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t true because it would have been true for other men in a similar situation."

The challenges in recounting the past

Crystal Jeans's latest novel is The Inverts, which tells the story of two best friends – one a lesbian, the other a gay man – who enter into a fake marriage in the 1920s. She believes that queer history offers writers a rich territory to mine but points out the constraints of working from real-life testimonies. "From what I’ve noticed our pool to fish from is a bit limited. Most original source material – diaries, books etc – was written by privileged people. White and wealthy. You’d not catch many queer coal miners jotting down their stream-of-consciousness memoirs between shifts. Vita Sackville West left us her letters. Gladys Bentley did not."

This was another reason I wrote The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle; I wanted to tell the story of one ordinary young gay man trying to express his love for another at a time when this would not have been accepted. But I also wanted to contrast this disturbing, sometimes horrifying picture with what life can be like for a gay man within today’s much more accepting society in the UK – and celebrate how much progress we’ve made. My inspiration was a series of interviews I conducted with older gay men whilst I was Editor-in-Chief of Attitude magazine, as part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary of the start of decriminalisation. I was stunned by the emotional impact and intensity of these stories of relentless persecution and oppression, of lives dogged by fear and shame. And I wanted to make sure stories like these weren’t lost – and reached as large an audience as possible.

When it comes to written – rather than verbal – evidence of working-class queer lives, this is often ambiguous. For Stephen Hornby's last play, The Adhesion of Love, he researched a group of working-class men from Bolton who set up a Walt Whitman appreciation society in the 1880s. They entered into regular correspondence with America’s great queer poet – and two of them even travelled to New York to visit him. In the play, Hornby has inferred that the men were what we'd now call gay. "If we look at the record that does exist of the Bolton men’s lives with the assumption that they were heterosexual," he says, "we're just left with a lot of puzzles and unanswerable questions. If we flip it, and assume they were interested in men sexually and emotionally, then all those puzzles disappear, and all the questions are answered."

But Hornby is careful to point out that before writing any play he carries out extensive research. "I've been working with the primary archival materials for weeks. I’ve read the contextual histories of sexuality in the period. I've visited the sites of the events. And then, crucially, I've made a homonormative assumption and told my story from that position."

As a fellow patron of the UK's LGBT History Month, creating an authentic fictional history is a responsibility I took equally seriously when writing The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. I carried out extensive historical research into the context of the period I was exploring and returned to the interviews I conducted while at Attitude. I wanted to do justice to the men who'd lived through similar experiences but didn't survive or weren't able to make their stories heard. And while my hope is that I've created a story which straight people will find interesting, I'm aware that, for the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes are much higher. 

"What we see all through history is that people are denied their past as part of a way to control them," says Hornby. "The fascist playbook is always to destroy the history and culture of the minority it is repressing. History empowers us. At its most fundamental, it says, 'We have always been here. We have a place.'" For the LGBTQ+ community, telling our stories and knowing our history is a matter of both self-discovery and survival.